To owe is solely the province of humanity. The universe owes us nothing; we, the living, must safeguard one another.
Together, these five works comprise a collection of twisty, comically deadpan tales, all of which turn brilliantly on the chasm between text and image. (In “This Is Not My Hat,” the fish thief boasts about the success of his caper while the illustrations depict his imminent doom.) Each story also manages to avoid the tropes so ubiquitous in even the most well meaning children’s literature. There are no tales of glory, no heroes’ journeys. Instead, Klassen cultivates a universe of absurdity, by turns brutal and tender. Although indisputably dark (the titular Skull lives in a vast, abandoned house, complete with dungeon and bottomless pit), Klassen’s stories never entirely succumb to that darkness — rather, they delve into the blackest corners of our souls and, somehow, locate joy.
In the New York Times best-selling “I Want My Hat Back” (2011), a rabbit steals a bear’s hat, and the bear retaliates by eating him. The small, aforementioned fish in “This Is Not My Hat” (2012) commits the same crime against a big fish, and meets an identical fate. In “The Skull,” Klassen’s 2023 retelling of a Tyrolean folk tale, a runaway named Otilla takes refuge with a talking skull in his old, secluded mansion. Otilla is all gentleness and sweetness — that is, until a headless skeleton comes looking for the skull, at which point she turns ruthless. Yet Otilla’s violence springs from loyalty to the skull who has offered her shelter and companionship. In Klassen’s universe, the happiest characters find satisfaction in shared experiences: a dance, a feast of pears, the quiet contemplation of a sunset.
As my child’s relationship to these books grows more nuanced, and he perceives their intrinsic disobedience, I expect he will find them challenging. But that’s the point. I don’t believe that fiction should placate. Survival is rarely elegant; sometimes it’s downright ludicrous, born of dumb luck or privilege. In the last pages of “The Rock From the Sky,” the turtle narrowly escapes death by Cyclopian heat ray, not through any clever feat — he’s unaware that he’s about to get torched — but by a rock that falls from the sky, crushing the monster just as it’s poised to strike.
These falling rocks — there are two that bookend the story — strike me as a serviceable metaphor. Upon impact, they demolish one of the pernicious fictions I expect my son will encounter sooner rather than later: namely, that a safe, long life is a reward for virtue. I hope he will know better. The universe owes us nothing; we, the living, must safeguard one another.
